pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
If we're stretching the goalposts. This gem came out in 1970


Occasional bassist for, and associate of Neil Young, Bruce Palmer laying down a masterful slice of headband trance rock with Big Black on congas and... Rick mutha f'in James on vocals. A motley crew for sure. And what a brew they make.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Thread is moving too fast for me to contribute properly if I only check in once a day but here are some psychedelic psych tunes off the top of my head (apologies if you've already had em)

 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
What if the infantilization we sometimes talk about here was born during this period? The whimsy was, I assume, a reaction to the stuffiness of the post war, stiff upper lip, children seen and not heard generation. Stuff like monty python also, right? Maybe the same in the states? Coming out of that relentlessly hard working first half of the 20th century, suddenly the kids are blowing their minds and dressing in gypsy garb or dancing around naked.The whimsy of the 60s can obviously be silly and often childlike. Then when it goes into darker teritory there still seems to be a connection to childhood where the music often expresses the loss of innocence. The singer from the silver apples coming to mind right now. Almost all of my psychedelic experiences have had some element of a return to childhood. Even if just a small moment. Seeing things with the same eyes as I did back then. Awe. The big wow. They say a child's brain is releasing dmt for the best part of its first decade. Anyway, combined with the general push for self expression and individualism going on in the 60s, I feel like this would be a perfect recipe for what we are now witnessing where there's almost an inability to grow up as it was set in the 60s and before. Not quite sure how to flesh this out further right now but it feels like there's something to it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I dunno, definitely i do find so-called toytown sike weird and creepy although I don't particularly like it. I get the link between Lewis Carroll and psychedelia cos Alice In Wonderland is a truly unusual and absurd book - the way it's written is another way of looking at things (the world) which is what people are trying to get from acid right? Not so sure about The Wind in the Willows or the one Syd Barret nicked the lyrics for Octopus from... I guess it's an idealised pastoral thing which I suppose i can see why people might like but why is it psychedelic? And what's with the victoriana stuff?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Certainly the Victorians thought of childhood - venerated it even - in a way that hadn't been done before. Maybe there was more focus on childhood and thus more such books. Perhaps this kind of elevation of childhood to this special magical time is what links Victoriana and psychedelia but it seems tenuous.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But I don't see it as an early forerunner of psychedelia, rather it was something appropriated by the psych movement.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor wryly noted that, when the band took LSD, “it was a case of four scousers exploring inner space and just finding more and more scouser down there”

theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/26/the-beatles-singles-ranked
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor wryly noted that, when the band took LSD, “it was a case of four scousers exploring inner space and just finding more and more scouser down there”

theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/26/the-beatles-singles-ranked
Ha ha
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think that's quite lovely, really. When I took acid I fell deeply in love with trees, Moretti beer (and beer bottles), my trainers and toilet roll. Didn't make me feel like "nothing is real" so much as everything is realer than I appreciated. Transient, but palpable.
 

version

Well-known member
I found a piece of folded mesh fabric on a trip which when you pushed the top layer made the whole thing move like water in a video game, three of us stood there for a good 20 minutes playing with that.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
are there any books on music/art/culture in the 60s that anyone itt would recommend? not necessarily on psychedelia, just something in between boomer-targeted rock star biographies and smart person academic stuff. like energy flash but about the 60s. been meaning to ask this for a while.

Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours is a good, thorough, opinionated book about psych and acid rock - bloody enormous too

I own but have not read yet but it's supposed to be really good: Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties - 1960-75 by Robert Hewison

Documents from the time that I can highly recommend:

Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall, which is about the UK Underground, the roots of the counterculture, not a lot on music but great, vividly account from one who was there

The Neophiliacs - by Christopher Booker, this is an odd one, a guy who was involved in the satire boom (so the whole Peter Cook, David Frost, Private Eye milieu) but either turned or always was conservative and Christian, it's a critique of the Sixties and the cult of all things new and tradition-breaking, but what's great about is the sense of detail and real-time - basically he seems to have sat there with a pile of newspapers going through the Sixties as it unfolded, so it packed with all kind of details i've never seen anywhere else - covers the gamut from fashion and pop to TV and politics - obviously he's against it all, but through being an enemy he has perceptions about it that are unique. There's a tremendous sense of out of control momentum that brings across the madness of the Sixties.

another document of that era that is a daft curio from today's viewpoint but very vivid is Playpower by Richard Neville (one of the guys behind Oz the underground magazine)

Jonathon Green - Days in the Life : Voices from the English Underground, 1961-71 - said to be a really definitive oral history of the British sixties. another 'own but not read' (got a chronic problem with buying books and not reading 'em)

loads more, especially the US end of things

modesty ought to prevent me mentioning this but have written a 1/3 of a book on psychedelia (understood expansively to include Krautrock, ambient, etc etc) - albeit written from a psychoanalytical / gender angle - the middle section of The Sex Revolts
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
oh yeah and one of the best short things ever written on the Sixties is the introduction to Ian Macdonald's book on the Beatles, Revolution in the Head. He sets up the context for them very acutely and pithily.

the whole book is great though - some of the entries on specific key songs like "A Day in the Life" or "I Am the Walrus" or "Strawberry Fields" are mini-essays on the Sixties, the currents the Beatles were surfing and the waves they were setting in motion
 

other_life

bioconfused
Les Rallizes Denudes

it's funny. i hold 'december's black children' and 'double heads' very dear, they're reeesssonant and huge.
but it feels more like being disillusioned w the psychedelic thing of the 60s rather than 'the outer limits'. its tonality is also either very blues rock or very lullaby.
the midpoint between the 'whimsy' of early popular-psychedelic culture that catalysed this thread and where we're at now. that early schizoid innocence refracted through the 'horror of the 70s' and thought back on in the 80s and 90s. scene veterans re-iterating the same set lists 100s of times. the alternative soundtrack to 'united red army'.

also:
Psychedelic culture is traced from its beginnings with the hallucinogenic celebrations at Eleusis 2,500 years ago, acknowledging in parallel the ancient shamanic plant drug cultures of South America and Mexico. A permanent alternative spiritual culture of the West is outlined as Lundborg follows the impulse from Eleusis through the Neoplatonism and pantheism of the Middle Ages, the rise of hermeticism and esoteric alchemy during the Renaissance, up to the highly visible psychedelic scenes of the modern world.

but this is just mckenna's Bit. who came first?
is this 'alternative spiritual culture' a feasible alternative to keep pursuing?

cool stuff, made me think about how creation records tried to redo that sound in the 80s with early pastels, biff bang pop, primal scream, the loft, etc.
and this end of things feels twinned to rallizes. and feeds right into the valentines. who are, again, tonally nothing special, standard 'indie canon comfort food' by this point. but the live experience of Pure Volume in its time and place, in both cases, is what stuck with people.

'clair' is sonically a link back to this 60s whimsy thing but fuck, the lyrics:
"see me, i'm climbing through the clouds,
the world is changing, colors clash.
clair.
see me, i'm climbing round the stairs,
i cut you with a piece of glass.
tear up clothes you used to wear,
and you act as if you just don't care.
clair."
it's just straight evil. no two ways about it.
 
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